Native American Branding In American Football: A Forgotten History

Thomas J. Farnan is a partner in the Pittsburgh law firm Robb Leonard Mulvihill LLP. He can be reached at tfarnan@rlmlawfirm.com.

If you were to drive down dusty State Route 37 in Ohio, past grain elevators and feed stores, to a broken sidewalk in the town of LaRue, you would find one of those blue steel historical markers that rise from obscure landscapes around America. This one says:

Home of the Oorang Indians, NFL’s Most Colorful Franchise

The Oorang Indian football team was founded by LaRue native Walter Lingo (1890-1966), owner of the Oorang Airedale Dog Kennels. The team, comprised of Native American Indians, played in the National Football League (NFL) in 1922-23.

The star player and coach was Jim Thorpe (1887-1953), a Sac and Fox Indian. Thorpe gained international fame as a two-time gold medal winner (decathlon and pentathlon) in the 1912 Olympics and was acclaimed as the “World’s Greatest Athlete.”

The team gave LaRue the distinction of being the smallest community ever to have an NFL franchise.

You would notice the superlatives: “greatest” and “smallest.” You would notice the non-sequiturs: “1912 Olympics,” “Dog Kennels,” “NFL franchise.” You would immediately sense a cosmic convergence of large things into a small place in a single forgotten moment of time. And you would begin to know the story of the Oorang Indians.

If you stopped in the library and began to review old newspapers, you would see that the story includes other superlatives and non-sequiturs, the King of Sweden and at least two Presidents of the United States among them.

“Ours was a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald at precisely the moment that the Oorang Indians began to play football. The story of the Oorang Indians is about the death of gods and the triumph of mortals. They were the Victorian gods of class and power that met their fate on the battlefields of Europe. And, to a lesser but still important extent, the playing fields of America.

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There is a sweet smell during autumn in Ohio. It is the smell of life giving way to death, the sort of death that falls into the earth and gestates, and becomes life in the season that always comes. It is the smell of soil, turned and planted. It strikes at the nerve in the back of the nose, near the brain. It is difficult to ignore.

Jim Thorpe ignored the flat afternoon light and the pungent autumn smells. But he could not ignore the stiff leather pads that protected him from tacklers. The Springfield hunting rifle did not feel right wedged between the pads and his shoulder. He gripped the barrel and eyed the target 50 yards distant. An Oorang Airedale hunting dog pointed at the small wooden mark. With that, history’s most famous sportsman fired, and obliterated the target.

Ten thousand who had gathered for the National Football League game cheered both the man’s ability with a rifle and the dog’s ability to track prey. For the marksman, the crowd’s adulation twinged a warm recollection. Ten years before, at the 1912 Olympiad, fifty thousand Swedes in the steep horseshoe bleachers at Stockholm’s Olympic Stadium had cheered his victory in the pentathlon, and again when he won gold in the decathlon.

“Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world,” Sweden’s King Gustav V gushed upon presenting the second of the gold medals. Thorpe, the irreverent son of Native American parents and an Irish grandfather, performed no reciprocal curtsey to the king’s majesty. “Thanks, King,” he famously replied.

With the same constancy he had shown a king, the dog’s halftime co-star bowed his head and retreated to a place near the bleachers to join his team before the start of the third quarter.

It cost $100 to enter the NFL in 1922. It cost $150 to buy a genuine Oorang Airedale hunting dog. The latter were more valuable, based almost entirely on the P.T. Barnum-esque salesmanship of Walter Lingo, a LaRue resident who bred the dogs. He had used principles of science to create a superior hunting dog, the Oorang Airedale. Then he created the Oorang Indians, an original NFL team named for the dog.

The team, located in LaRue but playing its games in nearby Marion, was made up entirely of Native Americans. Jim Thorpe was hired as a player coach and to help sell the dogs at half time. Lingo published a newsletter, Oorang Comments, to promote the dogs. “Let me tell you about my big publicity stunt,” he wrote in his newsletter. “You know Jim Thorpe, don’t you, the Sac and Fox Indian, the world’s greatest athlete, who won the all-around championship at the Olympic Games in Sweden in 1912? Well, Thorpe is in our organization.” The Indians played football, and at half time they danced, showed off hunting skills, and on at least one occasion the team’s left tackle, Long Time Sleep, wrestled a bear.

Nothing about this would have seemed strange at the time. Native Americans were a part football’s genome from its inception. They are, in many ways, the reason for the game.

The Civil War, fought between 1860 and 1865, had immersed Americans in the science of warfare: The deployment of force, flanking maneuvers, offense and defense, aerial artillery, breaking through the enemy line, the rout. Diagrams of battle appeared in newspapers. There soon developed a game played on college quads that looked very much like those diagrams: two sides gaining and ceding ground on a field based on planning, angles, and surprise. As in warfare, scoring was based on complete dominance of the field, pushing an opponent past a boundary.

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